Recently, the use of application containers has become an increasingly popular way of executing applications on a host computer. A container provides for the isolation of a group of processes from the others on an operating system. By making use of existing operating system functionality (such as Linux name spaces), containers maintain their own private view of the operating system, file system structure, and network interfaces. Containers share the operating system kernel with other processes in that the operating system supports execution of multiple containers as separate processes. However, containers can be constrained to some extent to use an amount of resources such as the central processing unit (CPU), random access memory (RAM), or input/output (I/O) devices. Containers have proven advantageous because they typically have a small system “footprint.” That is, containers provide a relatively thin encapsulation layer above and beyond any applications contained therein. Thus, instantiation and deployment of containers is relatively quick.
Presently, when a user requests that a new container be provisioned, there is no way for the user to select operational characteristics of the underlying platform upon which requested container will be executed. However, users may wish to specify various aspects of such a platform.